RELATIONAL ARTISTRY DURING CHALLENGING TIMES
Many of us are slowly coming to feel the scary implications of climate change for our own lives.
As devastating as the Covid Pandemic is, it is really a symptom of biospheric disruption and a glimpse of things to come. And the specter of fascism arising around the world is exactly the kind of oppression that caused the disruption in the first place. The uprising against white supremacy and fascism is just the beginning. We’re in dire need of an emerging culture and that begins right here and now with the relational artistry necessary to sustain it. And as our insights deepen, we begin to understand that, as dire as climate change is, it is not the whole story. The ice caps are melting, the rainforests are being destroyed, the oceans are dying, and our species is among the many endangered by the unfolding Sixth Extinction. The entire living world of which we are a part, our biosphere, is undergoing a traumatic crisis, and we are feeling it.
Because of this, many are feeling anxiety, grief, despair, and loneliness related to biospheric disruption, racism, misogyny, and other forms of abuse and oppression. Many more are numbing out their feelings through various forms of denial. And many of us are simply numbed out by overwork, financial pressure, stress, and anxiety. We normalize and tune out the depths of human suffering we’re immersed within.
Just like the rest of the planet, our living fabric of human relationships is suffering from chronic traumatization and dissociation. While we’re all meeting many challenges in responding to biospheric trauma, among the most daunting is tuning into and responding to our global relational trauma. We all have the evolutionary opportunity to do this each day with every person we meet. More than ever before, our lives will depend upon how we relate to each other.
The same things that are destroying our planet have also been bringing down our relationships with each other as human beings.
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Our best response will be to deeply touch each other’s heart and rise to meet this challenge together.